Readers' Top 30 Characters Results Revealed

We gave our readers the chance to vote for their favorite characters of the decade. Did your favorites make the list?

Our readers' choice poll has been up for weeks with votes flying all the while. Readers voted for characters created in the year 2000 to the present day. Nearly 70,000 votes were cast, with voters weighing characters on a scale of 1 to 10 points. These points were totaled and distilled into the Top 30 Readers' Choice Characters of the Decade (okay, 11 years) that you see below.

Congrats to Master Chief for earning the top character of the decade from GameInformer.com readers! To see how the numbers panned out, check out the chart below.

This chart displays the point totals for the top 30 characters. Click on it to see a bigger version.Write-In Winner

Readers also had the option to write in their favorite character who was not on the list of preset candidates. Many write-ins fell outside the criteria of the vote, appearing before the year 2000 (Solid Snake, Mario, Link, Gordon Freeman, Prince of Persia, Batman, Lara Croft). Other people wrote in characters that were already in the poll (Master Chief, Sora, Starkiller). Below are the top three write-in candidates that were embarrassingly not included in the regular voting.

Wow, Master Chief owned! Too bad Raiden didn't make the top 3 list for write-in votes. Oh well, I just hope people are excited for Metal Gear Solid: Rising. Being a Metal Gear fan, I'd like that game to do well critically and commercially...

How was this vote calculated? Was it in an order by points(like 1 = 30, 2 = 29) or was it calculated by whoever had the most votes for 1 got 1? Just wanting to know, as I'm pretty sure that Master Chief did not get that many #1 votes.

I'm saddened by a number of things on this list, like how John Marston outranked Niko Bellic. I just couldn't care as much for Marston as Bellic. The two had a lot of similarities but Niko seemed to have a lot more depth and character to him. Marston ended up feeling like a stereotypical gunslinger turned family man. Like The Saint of Killer from Preacher but without religious aspect and sweet devil-crafted revolvers.